In these tough times, must we speak about love, flowers, books, and poetry and rainbows? Yes we must.
Writers must write, and poets must keep poetry flowing through their brain into longing souls.
We must let our words do what they do, and that is to exist as tomorrow is not promised.
We must wake up with our hearts open, tending to our being on earth with patience and care.
We must brew our coffee and look around us and keep each other safe, and not let any force divide us.
We must remember, feel, love in everything we say, and do. We must be kind, or try to be. As much as we can.
We must press gently each other’s wounds to acknowledge them and take them into our consideration before we speak.
We must embrace the differences of our skin and love all colours and marvel at the oranges of the sunset, and rainbows at the end of stormy rain.
We must keep each other close to our hearts. And our minds, and remind each other of hope and compassion, the long road ahead of us.
We must treat heartache, misunderstanding, baseless assumptions, misplaced hostility as parts of our humaneness.
We must not forget our humility, our tenderness, our blossoming into the vast forest that is life, our becoming.
We must consider others’ hearts, sorrow in their face, their vulnerability, so we can start our path into generosity.
We must thank each other, and look each other in the eye, and speak low.
We must teach each other to sit with our discomforts so there will be less shouting, lashing out, anger and frustration.
We must understand differences and try to find peaceful middle ground. Build one. Make one.
We must think of children, waterfalls, the lakes and the seas. The quiet wisdom from the oceans that have been carrying out the earth for centuries.
We must study resilience from that of wildflowers sprouting everywhere in the cold and rain and snow.
We must touch the grass to feel the softness of our hands. To remind us that we are capable of loving. That we are love. And therein, we must speak love.
The longest con of all is that after a lifetime of attempting to remain an unshakable force, you will find yourself strolling the streets of Sicily on a Thursday afternoon with two glasses of red wine in your system, and you will be brought to tears by the sight of a beautiful old lady being illuminated by the setting of the sun as she cradles an orange in her hands like it’s some sort of precious relic or maybe the reincarnation of an old friend.
That is when you will find that there is love in most (if not all) things.
There is obviously love in intimate embraces, songs, poetry, and photographs, but there is also love in buying groceries for one.
There is also love in cleaning your room with the windows open and keeping warm with thrifted clothes that first belonged to somebody you will never know.
There is love at the bottom of the bottle of cheap screw top wine that you open before dinner and in the crumbs of olive oil cake scattered across your grandmother’s tablecloth.
Yes, there is love in languid summer nights spent next to a beautiful, brilliant man who kisses you softly and slowly and hangs on to your every word, but there is just as much love in long commutes on public transit.
There is love to be squeezed out of every fruit shared with somebody who makes your life brighter. And there is more love than you’ll believe in a sandwich from the deli down the street.
There is love in difficult conversations. There is love in anger and in hatred and there is love in indifference, too.
There is love in holding somebody to your chest and there is an incomprehensible amount of love in letting them go. Letting go of somebody you love is to say “be free” both to them and to yourself—that is why the best lovers are often leavers, too.
There is love in having tea and oranges with somebody who you know is a temporary fixture and sitting side by side while you listen to the boats go by as they soon will, too. There is love in that.
There is a love that will cut you so deeply that every decision you make as a result of it will give you no choice but to plead lunacy.
There is even love, deluded as it may be, in the soul-shattering corners of heartache and addiction and grief and terror and politics. There is love in places where it never belonged in the first place, and it is up to you to lead it home to safer waters.
There is love all over your face—your face exists because two people once loved each other so much that they couldn’t get close enough. You were conceived by some bout of passion, misguided or not. No matter how far back in your lineage you have to trace it, there is love somewhere.
I can promise you that you will find love wherever you look for it, even if you have to squint to see it.
I can promise you that if you see love in everything, then love will see everything in you, too. That is the very best of what I know to be true, and there is no other song to be sung.
These are the conversations we could have had. We’d have a cuppa. I could have waited for you, with a notebook. You’d have yours. We would write together in one peaceful afternoon.
Let’s make that happen.
I’ll tell you my stories and you yours. We will share how we feel about them then and now.
We’ll come back to these moments as memories. Something sweet we remember as life carry us through.
This is personal, and private. It’s time. It’s long overdue.
Let’s chat, just you and I. Let’s sit together, learn breathing lessons, and observe our thoughts in our most loving selves.
I made this in PDF so you can print them out, but honestly, it works better here in the paperback edition.
sit beneath the shade of a barberry’s branches and understand that generosity is older than thought. trees feed the weak. they slow their growth for the young. they give what is theirs to the sick. on this there is no debate.
run your fingers over moss-covered bark and know you’re touching layers of time. a tree’s outer skin is also its diary, marked by drought and storm and calm. it bears itself freely, wearing its history.
notice the ragged years after a mass flowering, when trees look bare and exhausted. beauty often requires sacrifice. our generosity leaves us vulnerable. but it also ensures a certain blooming; that the dance will go on.
watch insects devour a leaf, and understand: being alive means being part of a whole, not above of one. we all give. we are all taken from. you are not the exception.
observe the way seedlings wait in the earth for years, sometimes decades. patience is a strategy. timing is everything. growth is not always immediate. readiness is the only door.
much like trees, we are the improbable survivors of a vast and silent lottery. the odds of you reading this, breathing, are as slim as a beech seed becoming a forest elder: your life is, by all accounts, a statistical fluke. our heart beats, our lungs fill, but like trees who endure storms and rot to one day blossom, we are the rarest outcome of a million failed tries.
and when a seed does catch in the earth perfectly, prepared to sprout, survival is still a rarity, aging an even more unlikely accident of chance. so too with us. we are not guaranteed survival. we are not guaranteed joy. and yet we still spend ourselves— our time, our strength, our youth— on the sensible, human work of living. we raise children, plant gardens, write poems, and fall in love; make soup, care for aging parents, whistle and cry and pray and believe in one other.
My offering to you on this gray December morning is this: I want you to understand, in your heart, inside your bloodstream, deep in your marrow, that everything will always hurt your feelings and that’s a good thing. In the words of F. Scott Fitzgerald describing Gatsby, you have something rare and special, a “heightened sensitivity to the promises of life,” “an extraordinary gift for hope,” “a romantic readiness” that’s precious and worthy of respect.
When you’re aligned with this truth, you recognize that your huge heart makes it very, very frightening to invest in what you love. Your heightened sensitivity makes it extremely difficult to stick with the people, places, and things that light you up the most. Your ebullient soul will sometimes abandon what you need the most and you won’t even know why. You will simply lose the thread, get distracted, move on, withdraw, and you won’t recognize what you’re doing.
But when you dare to feel the pain of being what you are — a sensitive instrument, an open window, a tiny bird perched on the shaky limb of a huge tree in a windstorm, fragile and uncertain and volatile and wildly alive — you gain renewed respect for yourself. You understand why the world is so hard on you. When you respect this pain, you can feel vibrant inside your sensitivity, passionate inside your fear, hungry inside your anger, soulful inside your sadness, brilliant inside your anxious need for more love.
Kindness grows teeth sometimes, but they’re made of sugar. They melt when you look at them too long. I hold one on my tongue until it disappears, and I think, this is what it means to care for something that doesn’t belong to you.
The clover keeps multiplying behind my eyes. I blink and it’s a meadow. I blink again and it’s a mirror. In it, I see myself saying ah, like I’ve just remembered a song I use to sing before I knew what words were.
Love isn’t for building or breaking or even keeping warm. It’s a cloud that doesn’t know it’s raining. It drifts into your mouth, and you swallow it, and then you have to learn to speak gently, because the cloud lives there now.
I think the beluga is still swimming, even when I stop believing in oceans. I think kindness swims, too — it loops around, forgets its name, finds it again in someone’s half-asleep voice. I think we go ah not because it’s easy, but because something inside us wants to be touched without being asked why.
And maybe that’s the whole idea— not for love, not for anything, really — just for the quiet sound of ah, soft as breath, soft as forgiveness, soft as learning to stay.
Kindness leans against the door as if it knows I am still learning to hold things without owning them.
Some days, my want grows wings. My want doesn’t go far, but it keeps trying. It circles the clover, small and dizzy, the way love circles us — shy, relentless, pretending not to care.
The beluga rises again in my mind. I imagine her exhaling a silver thread that ties the whole ocean together — my heart, your hands, the moon’s tired shoulder. All of it shimmering and infinite.
I think that’s what softness means — it’s willing. Willing to dissolve, to laugh in the middle of crying, to open your palms and let the meadow grow wild.
I keep saying ah, a small devotion, a secret handshake with the world. Ah for the clover. Ah for the sugar. Ah for the breath that stays kind, even when no one’s listening.
*this is a copyrighted work and is part of my book.
There’s too much loneliness in this world, and around me. If only I could slice up my heart real nice and evenly, I would share it with everyone I knew so they would feel less lonely.
I would tell Father, I’d always be around and he could have all of me. I would tell Grampy, I was proud to have his eyes and his kindness. His wisdom ran in my blood. I would tell brother, he could share with me his love for Mother and the burden of existence never have to fall on his shoulder, I would carry it with him.
I have so much loneliness in me, so much more than I could bear. Mother gave it to me one night the first time she was standing on the ledge near the window in our thirty stories high three bedrooms flat. She was in love with heights, so every night she took the dragons out and played with them outside by the window. She’d learn to fly. And fall.
I got so lonely every time she did, for this grave feeling seeping through my skin, that she would fly (or fall) and would never find her way back to me (and Father). She had certain ways of seeing life and death. Most of the time, to her there was no difference in both. But at times she saw death as a release, and life was a cage in which one could only see what was not and could never feel what was real. What was real she saw in dreams.
She shared these dreams with me. She wrote them in a diary. Tell no one, she said to me.
In her dreams, I was born into her world. I was her.
Hello. Just checking in here to share a rather emotional insight from a poet I really like, Maya C. Popa, upon her upcoming poetry book, If You Love That Lady.
I am sharing this because I feel seen, and I hope everyone in similar place feel seen as well, and those who are not, to gain a perspective and be kind in their discomfort. Cheers.
Dear Friends,
I wondered whether poets might simply not be wired for self-promotion. If it might be possible that the “poetry gene” is antithetical to the “promo” one. That would honestly be great, because then I’d be off the hook. I could leave promotion to the prose writers and not feel like I was shortchanging a step of the process.
Poets aren’t bad at self-promotion because we’re inherently humble, shy, and allergic to marketing, but because the habits that sustain poetry have very little to do with the habits required to promote it. In fact, the skills we cultivate by writing the poem—attention, interiority, precision—have almost nothing to do with the work required to share it. Promotion can feel like an assault on the inner world by the outer one.
We’re all familiar with a certain mythos around the “true” artist who is so pure, she doesn’t care at all about sales or self-promotion. In that paradigm, promotion is “selling out” and misses the true goal of poetry.
What I’ve noticed is that this belief often comes from the same constituency who lament that the country is illiterate, that poetry is undervalued, and that writers “shouldn’t have to” promote their own books.
We create a culture of shame around ambition or outreach while simultaneously disparaging readers—or potential readers—for not choosing us.
As always, I want us to look at these thinking traps with compassion. I am not telling you to feel differently, but inviting you to understand why you feel the way you do, and to encourage you to choose a more empowering story, one that puts your considerable power back in your hands.
Most poets don’t earn meaningful income from books, and that’s ok. Most poets don’t write for the promise of financial renumeration. My goal has never been to live off of book sales, and I am completely at ease with this.
I mention the financials of poetry simply because, I suspect, they help explain why self-promotion can feel like labor without payoff. And I think we might benefit from resetting our expectation of what promotion means and what it’s good for. Not for a paycheck or a bottomline, but for reaching readers who might enjoy our work and deepening engagement with our community.
Each time I send out a newsletter about my own writing, I am haunted by the thought of strangers rolling their eyes and unsubscribing. I am worried that people will think that I am hungry for attention, self-absorbed, or that I must think I’m so great to be talking about my own writing.
The reality is that promoting my books or my writing community means tolerating discomfort almost daily. I’ve realized I may never be fully comfortable with promotion.
If I’ve learned anything, though, it’s that discomfort cannot be avoided. There is as much discomfort in not speaking up and not sharing my poetry as there is in being visible and advocating for my work or teaching. And I often experience a sense of pride on the other side of doing something I find uncomfortable.
After I finished the book, I felt a renewed sense of momentum around simply acting, even in the face of unease. I was reminded how fundamentally normal rumination is, and how I can only choose whether or not to take it seriously.
So, if you also have a book forthcoming, I want to invite you to practice saying, My book is coming out, and I’d love it if you would consider preordering. Even if it feels counterintuitive, awkward, or pushy to let people know that a thing you wrote for yourself, and for them, is about to enter the world.
You may never feel entirely good about this part of the writing journey, and that’s ok. You can still take action: announce the class, share your recent publication, post the preorder link even if your brain tries to keep you “safe” by discouraging the actions that support your goals. You can withstand a few minutes of discomfort in service of your long-term vision and in integrity with your aspirations.
these stories, they come to me in dreams the first time I fell asleep since they told me you’ve fallen into flatline
i dream you sometimes in colours, green and oranges, purples and blues, and not bleak nor dark,
we are not in the shadows
in these dreams, our children they’re born. they’re not sucked to death, they’re not stillborn nor bled away
they live and we give names to their innocent loving faces the eldest has my eyes, her brother has your smile in these dreams we’re not bitter we’re not numb from pain in these dreams you are standing tall
little daughter dances on your devoted steadfast feet her brother clung to your arms, his head rests on your secure and sturdy shoulder.
he’s falling into another dream.
in these dreams, I dance with you under the chuppah and you recite a long vow, a song we used to hum before we went to sleep about lovers lost and again, found.
tiny hearts 
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